A logistics challenge in the package delivery industry, as well as other industries dispatching service personnel to various locations, is the ability to provide the driver with current, accurate, and efficient instructions to complete the work on a given day. Companies with fleets of vehicles spend vast amounts of time and money to develop dispatch plans allowing a driver to efficiently cover as much territory in as little time as possible. For daily delivery services in which the route can vary on a daily basis (e.g., a vending machine service route, or courier service), the dispatch plan and route used by a driver on a given day is typically developed during the previous day, or at the latest, at the beginning of the work day. The work assigned to the driver is often based on a statistical or heuristic analysis of the amount of work that the driver can perform based on previous historical average delivery volumes.
The number of service stops on a given route is typically based on monitoring the driver's average workload during past work days. Using a basic route plan, a dispatch plan or delivery schedule is derived using the planned deliveries or service stops required to be completed for that day. Any changes to the dispatch plan (e.g., adding or deleting service stops) may impact the route traveled and may not be easily or efficiently accommodated. While experienced drivers familiar with a given route may heuristically adapt to some real-time changes to the dispatch plan, other real-time changes occurring during the work day cannot be effectively accommodated by an experienced driver, much less a driver that is not experienced with the route.
Another aspect complicating the delivery processes is the development of premium service levels and/or delivery commitment time guarantees. Many service providers offer a premium service level associated with a guaranteed service commitment time (also referred to as “service commitment”, “service guarantees”). These commitments require that delivery of a package will be completed by a certain time or within a specified time window. Service guarantees complicate creating or modifying a dispatch plan since they requires allocating the work along a route and accounting for individual package delivery commitments on that route. Not surprisingly, service personnel may fail to identify a package as having a commit time until after the guaranteed time of delivery has passed. In other cases, drivers may break from their planned route to satisfy a service delivery commitment, but this can create inefficiencies associated with completion of other deliveries.
These issues are not unique to package delivery services, but apply to performing other services, such as dispatching personnel for repair, installation, sales, or site inspection. Typically, a customer is provided with a time window to expect a service call. The customer desires a narrow time window for expecting service personnel to arrive whereas the service provider desires a wide time window to provide flexibility for the service personnel. In other instances, customers may have blanket restrictions as to when services can or cannot be provided. For example, some customers may restrict the times during which deliveries are accepted or services can be provided.
Further, execution of a dispatch plan can be impacted by mundane events, such as the weather, road conditions, and mechanical breakdowns of the service vehicle. Any of these events, individually or in combination, can impact the execution of the dispatch plan and cause delivery commitments to be missed, or at least, decrease efficiency because the dispatch plan, as originally determined, did not (and could not) take into account the occurrence of the event. For example, a road closure or traffic accident can cause the driver to inefficiently alter the route of the service vehicle with respect to the dispatch plan. While a driver familiar with a particular serving area may be able to heuristically alter their route based on personal knowledge, such ad-hoc deviations may not provide an optimal solution. Even an experienced driver, but one not yet familiar with a given route, cannot be expected to employ such ad-hoc deviations to ensure that all delivery commitments are met under exceptional circumstances.
Therefore, an unsatisfied need exists in the service industry for improved systems and methods of providing drivers with tools that update a dispatch plan upon detection on various types of conditions.